Alameda County election workers process an ever growing pile of arriving bags of ballots in the lobby of the recorder's office prior to being scanned upstairs.
Alameda County election workers hand-scanned all the ballots last night at the Alameda County Recorder's office in downtown Oakland after the polls closed at 8pm. Each ballot had to be hand fed through a computer, a tedious process that was expected to take over 12 hours. Ninety Alameda County election workers worked in shifts throughout the night and early morning, manning 60 stations.
Photo by Michael Maloney / San Francisco Chronicle on 6/6/06 in Oakland,CA MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT

Photo: Michael Maloney

Alameda County election workers process an ever growing pile of...

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Election official, Lawrence Lin who works for Visionary Integration Professionals, LLC, in Folsom, CA., feeds ballots into a scanner, as vote counting personnel complete final counting early morning, of regular ballots at the Alameda County elections department located at the Alameda County Auditor-Controller / Clerk-Recorder building in Oakland, CA on Wednesday, June 07, 2006. Many absentee ballots are yet to be counted and as such will delay any final result being established in the Oakland Mayor's race. shot: 6/7/06
Darryl Bush / The Chronicle **Lawrence Lin (cq)

Photo: Darryl Bush

Election official, Lawrence Lin who works for Visionary Integration...

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Mail boxes stacked full of absentee ballots sorted by type sit in the early morning inside the Vote Count Room of the Alameda County Registrar of Voters department in Oakland, CA on Wednesday, June 07, 2006. The absentee ballots won't be counted for days and as such will delay any sure result being established in the Oakland Mayor's race. shot: 6/7/06
Darryl Bush / The Chronicle **Lawrence Lin (cq)

Photo: Darryl Bush

Mail boxes stacked full of absentee ballots sorted by type sit in...

ALAMEDA COUNTY / County has plan to speed paper balloting / Supes likely to give nod to system used elsewhere in state

Alameda County residents went back to paper balloting Tuesday. They might as well get used to it.

This morning, the five-member county Board of Supervisors will decide whether to give a $13 million contract to an Oakland firm to bring paper back to the polling place. Only this time, it's paper with a little grease: optical scanners at all 830 Alameda County polling places to ensure no repeats of Tuesday night's marathon 15-hour manual vote count.

"For several years now, there has been a valid concern nationwide over electronic voting and whether it can be manipulated or hacked and whether it produces accurate results," said Guy Ashley, spokesman for Alameda County's registrar of voters.

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Alameda County tried e-voting to much fanfare in 2001. But its Diebold touch-screen voting system was ordered unplugged by Alameda County supervisors in March 2005 after a consumer lawsuit alleged a chain of breakdowns and a lack of a paper trail made it unreliable.

Without time to install a new system by Tuesday's primary, 90 Alameda County election workers in orange safety vests needed 15 hours to hand-feed nearly 200,000 paper ballots into low-speed scanners the size of industrial office printers, forcing the precinct vote result into early Wednesday morning. The outcome of several key races, including the possibility of a runoff in the Oakland mayor's race, will remain undecided for the next few days as last-minute absentee ballots are still being tallied.

Supervisors are promising a smoother election in November. They have already been reviewing proposals from three firms to streamline the voting process. The leading bid, from Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, would allow workers at each polling place to deposit voters' fill-in-the-bubble ballots into an optical scanner, which then feeds the information to a central computer.

The system worked without a hitch Tuesday in 20 California counties, said company spokeswoman Michelle Shafer. But a critic of the Sequoia system, consumer group Voter Action, says it has similar problems to Diebold's.

Part of the reason for the slowdown in Alameda County on Tuesday was that election workers had to hand-deliver ballots to one central location before they could be counted.

Sequoia would provide at least one touch-screen voting terminal in each polling place, Ashley said, available to people with disabilities. That computer would produce a printout of each voter's choices, but it would cycle back into the machine for safekeeping.

Any voter could use the touch screen if viewing the printout is important to them, Shafer said.

"I'm confident we'll have some sort of electronic voting configuration in place by November," said county Supervisor Scott Haggerty.

Diebold, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of electronic voting systems, has a checkered record in California.

During the October 2003 recall election, several thousand votes for Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante in Alameda County were somehow electronically transferred to Southern California Socialist John Burton. And problems with the company's electronic voting system caused disruptions at 180 Alameda County precincts during the March 2004 primary election.

That led then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to yank certification of the Diebold machines in four counties and restrict their use in 10 others until their security and reliability could be improved.

Diebold eventually agreed in 2004 to pay the state and Alameda County $2.6 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general and two whistle-blowers alleging that it made false claims when it sold its equipment to the county.

The settlement came after local and state officials learned that Diebold had installed uncertified software in the county's touch screens and that its system was vulnerable to computer hackers.

Professional hackers in Florida quickly broke into the Diebold system during a May 2004 test, changed the voting results and inserted a new program that flashed the message "Are we having fun yet?" on the computer screens.

In March, California-based Voter Action sued 18 counties -- including Alameda -- that used Diebold touch-screen equipment. Seven of the counties were removed from the lawsuit when they assured a San Francisco Superior Court judge they would use paper ballots.

All these problems led to a state law that went into effect in 2005 that requires all electronic voting machines to have a paper-ballot backup to record votes.

It seems voting, and human inclination for fraud, make computers and voting an untrustworthy pair, Ashley said.

"If you think about it, absentee voting is becoming the hot thing in Alameda County anyway, and that's paper voting," Ashley said. "Absentee votes have to be scanned -- we're just bringing uniformity to that process in each polling place."

And as for those 4,000 Diebold touch-screen voting machines the county bought for $12 million in 2001?

Someone will buy them, Ashley said.

"Some states don't require a paper trail, so there's a market for them out there. We'll try to recoup something."